Walks in Jefferies-Land 1912

Walks in Jefferies-Land 1912 Kate Tryon The RICHARD JEFFERIES SOCIETY (Registered Charity No. 1042838) was founded in 1950 to promote appreciation and study of the writings of Richard Jefferies (1848-1887). Website http://richardjefferiessociety.co.uk email [email protected] 01793 783040 The Kate Tryon manuscript In 2010, the Richard Jefferies Society published Kate Tryon’s memoir of her first visit to Jefferies’ Land in 1910. [Adventures in the Vale of the White Horse: Jefferies Land, Petton Books.] It was discovered that the author and artist had started work on another manuscript in 1912 entitled “Walks in Jefferies-Land”. However, this type-script was incomplete and designed to illustrate the places that Mrs Tryon had visited and portrayed in her oil-paintings using Jefferies’ own words. There are many pencilled-in additions to this type-script in Kate Tryon’s own hand- writing and selected words are underlined in red crayon. Page 13 is left blank, albeit that the writer does not come across as a superstitious person. The Jefferies’ quotes used are not word-perfect; neither is her spelling nor are her facts always correct. There is a handwritten note on the last page that reads: “This is supposed to be about half the book. – K.T.” The Richard Jefferies Society has edited the “Walks”, correcting obvious errors but not the use of American spelling in the main text. References for quotes have been added along with appropriate foot-notes. The Richard Jefferies Society is grateful to Kate Schneider (Kate Tryon’s grand- daughter) for allowing the manuscripts to be published and thanks Stan Hickerton and Jean Saunders for editing the booklet. TO THOSE WHO LOVE THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE AND THE WRITINGS OF RICHARD JEFFERIES, AND TO THOSE WHOM IT MAY LEAD TO KNOW AND LOVE BOTH BETTER, I DEDICATE THIS BOOK. Kate Tryon 31 Beacon Street Boston 1912. As for us, we listened to the voice of this master for ten years; we shall hear no more of his discourses; but the old ones remain; we can go back to them again and again. It is the quality of truthful work that it never grows old or stale; one can return to it again and again; there is always something fresh in it, something new. In a great poem the lines always bring some new thought to the mind; in great music, the harmonies always call forth fresh emotion, and inspire some new thought; in a true book there is always some new truth to be discovered. If all of the rest of the literature of this day prove ephemeral and is doomed to swift oblivion, the works of Jefferies shall not perish. Our fashions change, and the things of which we write become old and pass away. But the everlasting hills abide and the meadows still lie green and flowery, and the roses and the honeysuckle still blossom in the hedge. And those who have written of these are so few and their words are so precious, that they shall not pass away, so long as their tongue endureth to be spoken and to be read. [p.48] The Eulogy of Richard Jefferies Sir Walter Besant 1888. I A SHORT SKETCH OF JEFFERIES n 1863, an eminent American critic, writing on the death of the great Nature-writer, Henry David Thoreau, closed with the words,— I ―Nature has waited long for her Thoreau, and we can hardly expect, within a generation, at least, to see again one so gifted with her confidence.‖ He was mistaken. Thoreau‘s successor in hearing the modern Gospel of Outdoors had already come into the world. This was Richard Jefferies, the son of a farmer at Coate, near Swindon, in North Wilts, England. At that moment Jefferies was a tall, awkward, youth of fifteen who seemed to be devoting most of his energies to fishing and punting on Coate Reservoir, or to catching rabbits. Secretly, he liked to read books in his attic room, and, thanks to a printer-relation in London, more books found their way thither than are usually seen in the small English farmhouse. Thus he was forming a taste for writing which was first to find expression in work on the North Wilts Herald, of Swindon. But among these books there was little or nothing about the things of field or countryside. He had not heard of Thoreau‘s Walden, or of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, or of The Maine Woods or of Cape Cod; nor did he ever, in the thirty-eight years of his life, so far as we know, chance upon the records of his American confrere which would have delighted him so keenly. In fact, he was far, sadly far indeed, from beginning the work which was to win him an enduring and unique place in literature. Not until towards the close of his life, and then apparently only on being asked to write a preface to a new edition of The Natural History of Selborne, did he become acquainted with the fame of the immortal Gilbert White. If as a youth this book had been at his command, possibly it would have guided him directly into the path he was destined finally to follow, and so have saved him the bitter trouble of producing The Scarlet Shawl, Restless Human Hearts, and other early works belonging to the category of novels, and now so deservedly forgotten. Richard Jefferies was educated in the School of Humiliations. One realizes this in reading the first story of his life by Sir Walter Besant, and still more fully in the carefully-studied biography by Mr. Edward Thomas. His boyish plans for walking to Russia and for running away 5 to America were not the only ones that miscarried. The strain and stress of family feeling which for many years accompanied the decline of Coate Farm was not the end of anxiety about daily bread. Ill for a time, and unable to keep his position on the Swindon newspaper; discountenanced as a visionary and ne‘er-do-well, and seeking shelter with a neighbor at Snodshill Farm whom he promises to pay when better days come, he had faith in better days. He believed his genius, trusted his destiny. So did his aunt, Mrs. Harrild, of Sydenham. Too much credit cannot be given this fine woman for the share she must have taken in moulding Richard Jefferies. Hers was a second home for him, when he was a little boy. She took him to the seaside, showed him London, gave him books, and let him have money to publish his first ill-fated novel. In short, she it was who opened a bigger world for his imagination to feed upon, and saved him from being simply the countryman of Coate hamlet. That, this ambitious young writer lacked nothing in diligence is certain. During these first few years, mixed up with romances that do and those that do not see the light, appears a history of the Goddards whose family, with that of the Calleys of Burderop House, is one of the oldest and most interesting about Swindon; papers about ―Ancient Swindon‖ and its neighbourhood which make up that charming and valuable book now published under the title of Jefferies Land, and, at last, a real, practical success — the London Times articles on the condition of the agricultural laborer in Wiltshire. This must have been an agreeable surprise to the unbelieving family, for here was the dreaming fisherman, rabbit-catcher and would-be novelist suddenly developed into an authority on the economic problems of his country. Probably on the strength of this success, having reached his twenty- sixth year, he was married, in Chiseldon Church, July 1874, to Miss Jessie Baden, of Day House Farm. As this farm adjoins the Jefferies place, the young people must have been acquainted always, and we know that he became a more or less frequent visitor at Day House after Miss Baden‘s return from boarding-school at Salisbury. Doubtless Jessie Baden and Day House Farm were in the young writer‘s mind when he wrote Greene Ferne Farm. The six months after marriage were passed at Coate Farm, and a tablet on the front of a dismal stone house jammed among the business blocks of Victoria Street, Swindon, commemorates the fact that this was their home for two years. Here a son was born. Life was now a busy routine of writing for the local newspapers, and for the London Graphic, Standard, New Quarterly, Fortnightly and Frazers. All the while the dream of success as a novelist never vanished. In 1874, 6 the same year as his marriage, he published both The Scarlet Shawl and Restless Human Hearts,1 and was soon at work upon World’s End and an early form of The Dewy Morn. The Essays, ―Marlborough Forest‖, ―Old Village Churches‖ and ―Midsummer Hum‖, which appeared in the Graphic in 1875-6, were really the beginning of the writing on Nature, and it is an interesting coincidence that Mrs. Helen Allingham, the painter in color of English country sights, as Jefferies was their painter in words, was giving the world her first work, though not in this kind, as member of the artistic staff of the Graphic. It is a further coincidence that both Mrs. Allingham and Jefferies were born in the year 1848, but, whereas the former is still enjoying a prosperous life, the latter‘s brief day is long since ended. 1876 was an unsettled year for Jefferies, and he spent most of it at Sydenham, apart from his wife and child.

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